21 number one hits in a row. Not a single miss.
No slumps. No like awkward sophomore slumps.
No experimental phases that alienate the fan
base. Just nothing but hits. Yeah. Zero margin
for error. It's wild. I want you to imagine executing
your job with absolute undisputed flawless commercial
perfection for nearly seven entire years. I mean
the sheer pressure of that. Right. The pressure
of waking up on day 2000, knowing you haven't
made a single mistake yet and knowing, you know,
the entire industry is basically just waiting
for you to finally drop the ball. It's the kind
of pressure that completely defies the laws of
probability, honestly, because at a certain point
it stops being about the music itself. Oh, totally.
It starts becoming an exercise in structural
engineering. Like how long can you keep the tower
standing before a slight breeze just knocks the
whole thing over? Exactly. And that is exactly
what we're getting into today. Welcome to this
deep dive. Today we are looking at a very specific
artifact from music history. We're digging into
the historical record of the 1986 country music
hit. You've got the touch by the band Alabama.
Such a fascinating track to look at. It really
is. But our mission today isn't just to review
a single piece of music. For you listening right
now, we are dissecting the mechanics of a historic
uninterrupted winning streak in the music industry.
Yeah, how they actually pulled it off. Right.
We are going to look at the exact formula it
takes to build a monolithic pop culture tower,
the gatekeepers you have to appease to keep it
standing, and more importantly, what happens
when you finally decide to pull the wrong block
and the whole thing just comes crashing down?
It is really the ultimate case study in commercial
art. because this particular song isn't just
a hit. It serves as the climax, like the absolute
apex of an era of commercial dominance that we
rarely see in any medium, let alone something
as fickle as the 1980s music industry. Okay,
let's unpack this, because to understand how
you build a 21 -song tower, you really have to
look at the bricks. You have to look at the foundation,
yeah. So in December 1986, Alabama poured a very
specific kind of concrete to keep their streak
alive. Let's... Let's look at the specs here.
Let's do it. They release You've Got, The Touch,
as the second and final single from their album,
which was appropriately titled The Touch. It
comes out under RCA Nashville. Right, a massive
label. Huge. And it clocks in at exactly four
minutes and 15 seconds. And the writing credits
go to the trio of Lisa Palace, John Gerard, and
Will Robinson, with production handled by Harold
Shedd alongside the band themselves. What's fascinating
here is the absolute precision of that packaging.
I mean, when you hear that list of names, you
aren't just hearing a list of guys who happen
to be hanging around the studio. Right, it's
not a jam session. Exactly. You are hearing the
machinery of the Nashville co -writing system
at work. In the mid -80s, you didn't leave a
multi -year winning streak to chance. or to,
you know, the whims of inspiration. You bring
in the pros. You brought in architects. Harold
Shedd and those specific writers were brought
in because they understood the formula. The historical
record explicitly describes this song as a ballad
performed in the band's signature mellow style.
Signature mellow style. Yes. And that phrase,
signature mellow style, is the key to everything.
They aren't experimenting. They are engineering
a product. designed to slide perfectly into a
groove they've already carved out with the album's
previous hit, which was, Touch Me When We're
Dancing. See, I look at that phrase, signature
mellow style, and I immediately think of like
McDonald's french fries. Okay, I see where you're
going with this. Right. because people don't
go to McDonald's hoping the chef tried a crazy
new artisanal seasoning today. They go because
they want the exact same fry they had in 1980.
They want consistency. Exactly. So my question
is, if a band releases a ballad that sounds exactly
like what people expect, are they just playing
it safe to protect their status? I mean, at what
point does a signature style just become a creative
safety net? Well, I wouldn't call it just playing
it safe, actually. I think that severely understates
the difficulty of what they were doing. Oh, really?
How so? Because delivering a flawless pop country
ballad 21 times without boring, the audience
takes absolute genius. Mastery and safety might
look identical from the outside, but creating
that exact same emotional response without sounding
like a total rehash is a razor's edge. Okay,
that's a fair point. It's hard to be consistently
good without being boring. Exactly. But you're
right to look at the commercial motive. By late
1986, Alabama wasn't just a band, they were an
institution. And institutions are, by nature,
naturally risk averse. They have too much to
lose. Right. Just look at the physical release
itself. The B -side, like the bonus track you'd
get when you bought the physical vinyl single,
was a song called True True Housewife. Oh, man.
Talk about Know Your Demographic. Isn't it wild?
It shows a production team that knows exactly
who is buying the records, exactly what their
daily lives look like, and exactly what kind
of emotional validation they want from their
music. It is a highly, highly calibrated product.
And when you say highly calibrated, we need to
put the hard numbers to this because this brings
us right into the sheer scale of the tower they
had built. The numbers are staggering. They really
are. You've got the touch hit number one on the
Billboard Hot Country singles chart in April
1987. But it wasn't just an American phenomenon.
Really, the cross borders. Yeah, it hit number
one on the Canadian RPM country tracks too. So
it dominated the entire North American continent.
And this was their 21st consecutive chart topper.
21 number ones in a row. If we connect this to
the bigger picture. The sheer statistical improbability
of that is just, it's mind blowing. This uninterrupted
streak dated all the way back to August 1980
with their song, Tennessee River. So that's almost
seven years. Yes, for nearly seven years. From
the dawn of the decade right through to the late
80s, this group maintained the exact pulse of
the public. But to really understand how rare
that is, you have to remember how the industry
worked before the internet. Right. No algorithms
to help you out. Exactly. There was no Spotify.
There was no viral TikTok trend to push a song
up the charts overnight. Right. You had radio
gatekeepers. Precisely. Radio programmers were
highly risk averse gatekeepers. If you strayed
from the formula, a radio station manager in
Ohio or Texas would simply refuse to put your
vinyl record on the turntable. And then your
streak is done. Right there. To not have a single
miss, to never release a track that stalled at
number two or number five, just because a few
key radio stations didn't like the vibe, requires
an alignment of songwriting, timing, cultural
mood, and marketing that is almost impossible
to replicate today. Here's where it gets really
interesting. Let's bring back that Jenga analogy
from earlier. Oh, I love the Jenga analogy. It
fits perfectly. So in 1980, they pull the first
block, Tennessee River, and place it on top.
The tower is completely solid. But with every
single consecutive number one hit over the next
six years, they are pulling another block. And
it gets more and more unstable. Exactly. The
tower gets taller and taller and visually more
impressive to everyone in the industry. But structurally,
the pressure to not be the single that makes
the whole thing topple over becomes immense.
You can't make a single wrong move. Right. By
the time they are recording, you've got the touch.
They are placing the 21st block on a tower that
is basically swaying in the wind. Just imagine
the psychological weight of walking into a studio
and knowing, if this goes to number two, I am
the one who ruined the streak. Oh, it would be
paralyzing. Because when you have a tower that
tall, you do not make sudden movements. You stick
to the signature mellow style. You stick to the
fries. Yes. You rely on the formula that has
kept the tower standing for 20 blocks. The market
rewards consistency. The radio stations know
exactly what they're getting. The fans know what
they're buying. Everyone's happy. Right, so the
risk of deviating from the formula becomes existential.
It's no longer just about whether a song is good.
It's about whether the song can bear the weight
of the 20 songs that came before it. Which makes
what happens next so completely fascinating.
Yeah. Because every Jenga tower eventually falls.
They always do. Always. And the streak was officially
broken by the very next follow -up single, released
in November 1987. This song was called Tartop.
And it didn't just miss the number one spot by
a hair, it peaked at number seven. Which, you
know, to be fair, is a very respectable chart
position for almost any other band in the world.
Oh, absolutely. Number seven is a massive life
-changing hit for a normal artist. For sure.
But for a band that hasn't seen anything but
number one for nearly seven years, A number seven
is a commercial earthquake. The tower has hit
the floor. But the most crucial detail from the
historical record is the why. The Y is everything.
Yeah, because Tartop is explicitly described
in the sources as semi -autobiographical. And
there is the mechanism of the failure. That is
the exact pivot point. Let's analyze that stark
contrast because it tells us everything about
how pop music works. Okay, lay it out. On one
side you have, you've got the climax of the Strik,
a song written by three outside writers, carefully
produced to fit a universally appealing, comfortable,
mellow ballad formula. Very safe. Very safe.
Because that kind of song is a mirror. The audience
can project their own romantic feelings, their
own spouse, their own life onto the lyrics. It's
a blank canvas for the listener. So it's basically
do the emotional work for them. Precisely. On
the other side, you have Tartop. By stepping
into semi -autobiographical territory, the band
is no longer acting as a mirror. They are acting
as a window. Oh, that's a great way to put it.
They are asking the audience to look at them.
They are removing the blank canvas and saying,
here is our specific personal history. The listener
is suddenly an observer, not a participant. And
the radio programmers and a fraction of the fans
just rejected that shift. Wait, I have to jump
in here. Because this feels like a brutal lesson
from the music industry. Alabama basically had
to choose. Keep feeding the machine to stay at
number one or tell the truth and drop to number
seven. Yep, that was the trade -off. In 1987,
they chose the truth. They dropped their incredibly
successful signature mellow style for a moment.
to release something inherently more vulnerable,
and the market immediately punishes them for
it. What does that say to you about the industry's
appetite for authenticity versus a comfortable
formula? I mean, it says that the market's relationship
with an artist is entirely conditional. Audiences
claim they want authenticity. We hear that word
thrown around constantly in culture today. Oh,
all the time. Everyone wants to be authentic.
Right. But... What the commercial data often
shows and what this broken streak vividly illustrates
is that audiences actually want reliability.
They form a parasocial bond, not with the actual
human beings in the band, but with the feeling
the band's music gives them. When Alabama shifted
from providing a universal romantic feeling to
sharing a semi -autobiographical story, a portion
of that audience simply didn't make the jump
with them. They just wanted the feeling back.
Exactly. The formula is comfortable because it
doesn't challenge the listener. Authenticity
is risky because it demands a different kind
of attention, and commercial radio is not built
for challenging attention. That is just wild
to me. You try to show the world who you really
are and the world says, that's nice, but we prefer
the meticulously engineered ballad, please. Pretty
much. But the story doesn't end in defeat, which
is the best part of all this. Immediately after
Tartop broke the streak, they turned right around
in early 1988 and started a brand new streak
with the song Face to Face. which highlights
their incredible resilience both as a business
and as artists. Yeah, they didn't just give up.
No, a lesser group might have spiraled after
losing a record breaking streak. The psychological
blow of the tower falling could have led to second
guessing every single creative decision, firing
the producers, panicking. Totally, just tearing
it all down. Instead, they absorbed the feedback,
recalibrated their approach, and immediately
returned to the top of the mountain. It proves
that the foundation they built wasn't a fluke.
They knew exactly how the machine worked, and
they proved they could just turn it back on whenever
they wanted. Speaking of perfectly engineered
emotional products targeting very specific demographics,
I have to bring up a bizarre but absolutely essential
piece of trivia that shows up in the record for
this song. I know exactly what you're gonna say.
because it paints such a vivid picture of how
wonderfully crowded and chaotic the pop culture
landscape was at this exact moment in 1986. It
really is a perfect snapshot of how weird pop
culture is. I can't ignore it. Yeah. If you look
this song up online today, databases and encyclopedias
explicitly take the time to note that this Alabama
song, You've Got the Touch, is entirely unrelated
to Stan Bush's song of a very similar title,
The Touch, from the 1986 Transformers animated
movie. This raises such an important question
about how we archive culture and how linguistic
blank canvases work. Right. Why do we even need
that warning? Well, encyclopedias have to make
these distinctions because human memory is messy
and search algorithms rhythms are completely
literal. But when you step back, it's a fascinating
reflection of cultural convergence. You've got
the touch is just a floating idiom. It's a phrase
that means everything and nothing all at once.
It's the ultimate blank canvas phrase. Exactly.
And because of that, you have two completely
different corners of 1986 pop culture, pulling
it down from the ether at the exact same time.
On one side, you have the pinnacle of country
music commercial dominance, crafting a mellow
romantic ballad to sell to housewives. And on
the other side, you have a heavy driving synth
rock anthem backing up animated action packed
alien robots fighting to the death in a cartoon
movie. It is exactly like showing up to a massive
1986 New Year's Eve party wearing the exact same
outfit as someone else across the room. Except
in this case, one person is a mellow country
singer holding an acoustic guitar, and the other
is an action -packed laser -blasting Autobot.
And they just kind of look each other from across
the punch bowl and give a little nod. Life phrase!
Thanks, you two. The fact that the historical
record actually has to put up a guardrail to
keep people from confusing an Alabama love song
with an Autobot battle anthem is just a delightful
quirk of history. It's so good. But it reinforces
the point we made earlier about the Nashville
system. Both of these songs were hyper -manufactured
emotional products of the 1980s. Oh, that's true.
One was manufactured for romantic vulnerability,
and the other was manufactured to sell plastic
robot toys to 10 -year -olds. They both utilized
the exact same linguistic tool to get the job
done. It really is the best kind of trivia, because
it connects directly back to the mechanics of
the industry. OK, so... What does this all mean
for you, the listener? Bringing it back home.
Always. We've traveled from the specific bricks
of a perfect country ballad, through the immense
pressure of a 21 -song Jenga tower, the commercial
sting of an autobiographical misstep, and even
into the realm of animated robots. Quite the
journey. But bringing it back to your daily life.
where you were lying on your own signature mellow
style. Are there areas in your work, your hobbies,
or your relationships where you figured out the
exact formula for success and you're basically
just playing the hits because it's safe and you
know it works? That's a tough question to ask
yourself. It is. And more importantly, are you
terrified of your own tartop moment? Are you
avoiding taking a personal, authentic risk simply
because you're afraid of breaking a streak you've
built up over the years? That is really the core
takeaway here. Success is so often measured by
what we can consistently output without failing.
The industry and society at large rewards the
streak. They reward the 21 number ones. They
absolutely do. But true growth, both creatively
and personally, might actually be measured by
the streaks we are willing to intentionally break.
It takes courage to step away from a winning
formula, to stop being a mirror for everyone
else's expectations, and to try something real.
Even if it costs you. Right. Even if it means
you only peak at number seven for a while. Growth
is the streak you're willing to break. I love
that. Which leaves us with one final thought
to mull over as we wrap up this deep dive. Let's
hear it. We started by imagining 21 flawless
days at work. But if a 21 song streak of perfect
number ones is finally broken, simply because
an artist decides to release something semi -autobiographical,
it forces us to ask, is ultimate unbroken commercial
perfection only possible when you keep your true
personal story completely out of the music?